This is the CD-ROM release of the Callhome Japanese Speech Corpus,
produced by the Linguistic Data Consortium.  This release contains
speech data files ONLY, along with the minimal amount of documentation
needed to describe the contents and format of the speech files, and
the software packages needed to uncompress the speech data.

Other components of the Callhome Japanese Corpus include transcriptions
of the speech, full documentation on the transcription conventions and
format, and complete auditing information on the speakers represented
in the transcripts (including gender, channel quality, and so on).
These text components of the corpus are obtainable from the LDC via
the internet (i.e. using an FTP or World Wide Web connection to the
LDC's ftp/www server).

Shipment of this CD-ROM corpus has been accompanied by E-mail
notification from the LDC to the original recipient of the CD-ROM set,
describing how to obtain the associated text components by electronic
transfer.  As modifications are made to the transcriptions and other
text files for this corpus, the LDC will announce the availability of
an updated release of these materials to everyone who has received the
corpus.

If at any time you need to obtain a fresh copy of the text files for
Callhome Japanese, or you want to check the status of the currently
available release version for this material, please send an E-mail
request to:

		ldc@ldc.upenn.edu

Be sure to mention the corpus name, and the name of your organization.


Summary of CD-ROM contents:
---------------------------

0readme.1st		this file
callhome/doc		directory of documentation for Callhome Japanese
			  speech data
callhome/Japanese	path to the speech data files, divided into
			  train, devtest and evltest partitions

shorten			directory of files for Tony Robinson's "shorten"
			  software for speech compression
sphere			directory of files for the NIST SPHERE software
			  package (compression and editing utilities)

Note that the partitioning of speech data into sets for "training",
"development test" and "evaluation test" sets reflects the original
usage of the speech files by participants in the U.S.  Government-
sponsored project on Large Vocabulary Conversational Speech Recognition
(LVCSR).  As of this release, there are 80 conversations in the training
set, 20 in the development test set, and 20 in the evaluation test set.
Additional (new) sets of 20 evaluation test calls will be released as
the benchmark tests are carried out for this project.